protrait & letter. (to q). (on his birthday)

That's what it is, a sigh of sleeping giantness

That causes turbulence even in the shy, still unused fields
Stacked to the horizon, not even waiting, secure

In their inertia. A force erupting so violently
We can't witness any of it. Best to leave it alone

And start it all over again, if there's a beginning.
The stalk is withered dry, my love, so will our heart decay.

Unless we omitted something. And we did. It'll cure it.
It will have to. But I can't whisper that story yet.

_________________________________________________________________from Forgotten Song, John Ashberry



PORTRAIT.

you are everything they forgot to say you're not. you are the clown-show and the massacre and the carnival and the funeral march. you are heavy as lead and solid as clay and dark as wet tree trunks and caustic and biting as the Prague snow creeping its way from your toes up your ankles. you are the dreams your father had of you when you were nothing but an idea, and before that, you are the first lines of the dreams god had of you when you weren't even an idea yet. when you were completely you, formed as a cloud and imbibed into air and rain and god took you and passed light through you and your lips were the red of a rainbow. and half the time your heart is still the blue of the sky.

you are errors in the sequence of time, you drag it down and slow it and speed it up and throw it back around on itself so it spins in loops like when you played with glowing sticks from the campfire as a child. (when you threw every object you could find into the fire to watch it burn into different shapes and shades of red and white and grew sick from the fumes). everynight you disrobe yourself back into your constituent memories. your history is the parchment of your skin. your eyes say more than enough. your mouth is useless, a vessel you use to hide and distract. you never catch anyone staring at your hands and that makes you sad. and all things make you sad, so you build dams and bridges to navigate your sadness away from itself.

you think making love is the same as listening to music, alone, late at night, since love is love and when made right: is invisible to eye and body (since skin merging with skin is how souls embody one another). everything you hope for is made of love. or combined to form it. or taken apart to reveal it, growing, softly and tenderly, like a pure white root the color of an easter lilly.

and when all those dreams made of history slowly grew arms and legs and teeth and spoke their first words (which dad says were: what's this?), and grew to hate and love and fear and aspire to sublimity, aspire to weightlessness, and grew deep as fractal geometry, when age encountered its own division, time amongst time gives time and time remains still more, always leftover seconds that could have been something they're not and never are going to be (and Martha says this to me and i never tire of hearing it, say it again, say it always: it could never have been anything else. it could never have been anything else), when that happened, we played the roles we played. we played lover. and friend. and passionate lover. and devoted son. and mourning brother. and we played helper, and we played helped. we cried on phones and we held hands. we issued warnings and we took walks and we stared at snow and wondered about the whiteness of the place we came from when we were dream inchoate. when we were so pure as to not have ideas and dreams and hopes and slept peacefully in our insubstantiate oblivion. when i slept as nonexistence how sweet i was. how silent, and how gorgeous. how peaceful. with eyelashes made of others' lives.

and you wrote words of it. a journal of time. a time machine to remind you of birds on wires and the color of women's backs that you kissed, and through the open window it was all moonlight and dark night and in the streetlights said farewell to. and you wrote of it to escape it and found it there, holding a box full of itself (wrapped in time, delicious and assiduously present).

you see yourself as flesh and connective tissue. as wrangled dream and potential energy (plates suspended mid air, always liable to fall, and for all its cracks, still held together). you see yourself as drifting through gravity's delicate web. you see yourself as responsible and victim. you see yourself at the center of everything. you are the flower and the daydream. you are the genocide and the corn-stalk. you are the sound of train and the refraction of light. you are everything Bach hoped for in a listener, and everything god hates to see in a man. you are all boy and no man. and all geriatric and no child. and all juvnile and not a tooth of wisdom to you. and you are all story, all fable, a whole mythology condensed into the shape of yourself. your shadow is soo black it redefines color. you are the sort of miracle no one notices.

you are pain and redemption to all who know you. you are agitation and vexation and you argue over nothing and are nothing and mean nothing, and yet, somehow, still managed to pull together enough carbon to exist. you are a tree that lost its herd. and you bide your time, till to the soil you return, relearning how to transform your two hands back into roots of lillies, and your teeth the blossoms of cherries, and your eyes into fields of snow broken hearted lovers will cry in.

life is just moving from dream to history. (and all in between must only be love or circumstance)


LETTER.

dear q,

dear new man made of old man. dear childish man. dear unlearning man. dear constantly mistaking man. dear forgetting relearning always remembering man. dear too fully loving apathetic not certain up from down man. dear man who misses all the things he remembers to miss.

in two hours you will be born again. newest again. unmistaken as the 26th you. the pinnacle of you yet achieved. the best we've ever had. the most hammered and bandaged you we've ever seen. the born-again. the resurrected. you are the son of you. the father of you. you con.trans.substantiate yourself. the heamaphrodite you.

i haven't a clue who you want to be as 26q. i know you have your ideas. i know you want to develop a certain weightlessness. a certain unencumberedness. i know you plan on filling voids. i know you plan to releiving yourself of godfulness. i know you plan on finally grasping the sharpness of your eyes. i know you plan on evening out the knives of your temper. i know you want to make love, to books and ideas and poems and people. i know you miss the smell of women's hair and their weight lying besides you. i know you think driving fast with the windows down is as close to flying as you will get. i know you sense your own newness. i know you can't notice your frowns and your cut hands and the skin you burnt last week has all peeled away now.

i wish you luck old new young man. i wish you antigravity. and volition. i wish you immersion in your own skin. i wish you embodiment in your own skin. i hope you are you to the fullest of your capacity. i hope you are you in the clearest and most precise way. i hope you speak like you and walk like you and pray like you and move like you and even, when no one is looking, dance like you in ways you've never managed before. i hope you can divide by smaller numbers and approximate to more digits who it is you were meant to be. i hope you can climb the mountains you've made inside your chest, and i hope you can bury the fingertips and liptips and hairtips of the things you blame yourself for. i hope you redeem all the debts you think you owe. i hope you find grass. and flawlessly blue skies. i hope the sound of the ocean stops frightening you. i hope you sleep long, impregnable black sleeps. dreamless sleeps. unfettered youness.

dearest q...

i want you to fade into black. (and be indistinguishable from the passage of time. and memory. and mostly, i want you to be love incarnate.

much love always.
q.